Some scholars say Japan's Christian history began long before the so-called "Christian century" (1549-c.1640). Their claim takes us all the way back to 7th- and 8th-century Nara, where Nestorian Christians from Persia are said to have built churches, operated a leper hospital and even converted the Empress Komyo, wife of the devout Buddhist, Emperor Shomu (reigned 724-749), to Christianity.
The evidence is tantalizing but inconclusive. If they existed, Nara's early Christians left no mark on the culture. Spanish and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who arrived some 800 years later not only had to start from scratch, they had to define scratch. How to begin to explain, in an alien language, such alien and mysterious concepts as transcendent Godhead, the Virgin Birth, the sacrifice on the Cross of the Son of God for the redemption of mankind?
The scale of the task is a measure of the determination of the men who faced it, and Francis Xavier, the Basque Jesuit whose landing at Kagoshima in August 1549 inaugurates the "Christian century," was nothing if not determined.